Soft-gluon resummation for single-particle inclusive hadroproduction at high transverse momentum
S. Catani, M. Grazzini, A. Torre
TL;DR
This work addresses soft-gluon effects in high-$p_T$ single-hadron production by developing an all-order threshold resummation for the partonic cross section at fixed rapidity and by deriving the near-threshold structure of the NLO corrections in color space. It provides a resummation formula in Mellin space that factorizes into radiative and hard parts, explicitly treating color interference through a soft anomalous dimension and establishing results valid to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy and extendable beyond that. Crucially, the authors extract the IR-finite one-loop hard-virtual amplitude, enabling explicit control of color interferences and paving the way to NNLL resummation. The framework is applicable to both unpolarized and polarized scattering and sets the stage for extensions to jet and heavy-quark production, with practical relevance for improving predictions of single-particle inclusive cross sections at high transverse momentum.
Abstract
We consider the cross section for one-particle inclusive production at high transverse momentum in hadronic collisions. We present the all-order resummation formula that controls the logarithmically-enhanced perturbative QCD contributions to the partonic cross section in the threshold region, at fixed rapidity of the observed parton (hadron). The explicit resummation up to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy is supplemented with the computation of the general structure of the near-threshold contributions to the next-to-leading order cross section. This next-to-leading order computation allows us to extract the one-loop hard-virtual amplitude that enters into the resummation formula. This is a necessary ingredient to explicitly extend the soft-gluon resummation beyond the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. These results equally apply to both spin-unpolarized and spin-polarized scattering processes.